Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 02, 2011 @02:13PM
from the that's-a-paddling dept.

Steve Jobs was on hand today deliver a speech at Apple's iPad 2 event. The
new iPad will feature dual-core processors, 2x faster CPU, and 9X faster
graphics, front and rear cameras. And it's 33% thinner. Prices range from $499 to $829 depending on if
you want 3G and 64 gigs, and it ships March 11. iOS 4.3 will ship at the same time.

Looks like mostly a hardware bump and some minor functionality improvements. But will lot of apps emerge that will take advantage of the big increase in speed(at the cost of alienating the 15 million existing iPad 1 owners)?

Sure, but you know who I really feel sorry for? All those poor suckers that bought iPhone 4 and who will miss out on all the great features iPhone 5 will probably have whenever it is released. That's why I never buy any version until the final, ultimate one which will never be improved upon and which has all possible features.

The same has been true of iPhones. Programmers and designers generally over-estimate what you can get out of a piece of hardware, and it runs slower than it should. New rev of the hardware comes out, and the slow-feeling apps now feel crisp. Everyone starts developing for the new platform, and repeat.

Sure, it will "run" on an iPad 1. But given a few years, and the iPad 1 owners will be a small minority, and everyone will expect apps that push the hardware.

The device is under 9mm thick. Making the battery replacable means you have to add two more layers of thickness around the battery module itself, another layer inside the battery bay, a little space for fit tolerance, all adding up to non-trivial increase in overall thickness just so a small percentage of users can actually replace the battery (most who say "I want a removable battery" won't actually do it). Never mind the extra space/weight needed for the connector, interface circuitry, and other stuff. In addition, the replacement battery would have to be almost as wide as the iPad, only ~3mm thick, and somehow strong enough to not bend & break. Solving all that just isn't worth the problem being solved.

The 10+ hour run time is real. Are you REALLY not going to have a chance to recharge, using a 2 cu in charger, during that time?

In a year of heavy use, I've drained my iPad battery at most a half-dozen times, maybe twice when having a charger nearby wasn't a viable solution.

He's talking about when the batter DIES not when it runs out of juice. Rechargeable batteries degrade significantly with age. After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery. Throw-away society I guess.

He's talking about when the batter DIES not when it runs out of juice. Rechargeable batteries degrade significantly with age. After a year or 2 your Ipad2 is going to have a battery life of an hour or two and you're not going to be able to replace the battery.

Yes, except no;-)

You just described lithium-ion batteries. Apple is using lithium-polymer, which degrade much more slowly, and are quite likely to outlast the device itself. There is really no need for a replaceable battery in the iPad.

I dunno where you get your information, but Li Ion degrades slower than LiPo. The reason LiPo is used is not because of capacity or extended life, but because the polymer can be made into small thin shapes for use in handheld consumer electronics. Basically anything smaller than a laptop is probably using LiPo.

In all of the iOS devices I have ever had, I have not once had to replace a battery. And even if you need to Apple can do that for you, which is something like once every three years at worst, probably longer (since as I said I have not had to replace a battery in a device yet).

In any device if I wanted longer use time (for instance on an international flight) I always found an external power pack preferable, as they can be smaller than a second battery for a real device - I mean think of how an iPad extra battery would have to be shaped, all by itself it would be pretty bulky and large, where an external battery can opt to be much thicker but also far less higher and wider to provide more battery life in a more compact package.

Apple has made the right choice by making the devices as small as possible, and moving the occasional need to longer use into an external form that can be customized into many shapes and sizes and capacities instead of just one monolithic replacement battery.

I don't know a single person who would rather the user replacable battery, so I guess your anecdote is countered by my equally invalid one. The hard stats will say whether people prefer this over the iPad 1.

That's an interesting perspective, considering some of the amazing [amazon.com] consumer video cameras that have come out over the past few years. 1080p30 is now standard. But more than that, the color saturation and reproduction has gotten much better, movement tear is less common, and compression artifacting on your source feed is basically gone. Camcorders are moving into using 3-color chips. Good optical anti-shake still requires about a $500 price point camera (since that technology is pretty mature at this point), but digital anti-shake has gone from godawfully blurry to just a bit blurry.

And on the high-end, the Reds have come out and taken professional production by storm. A video camera with high enough quality to take out single frames and use them as stills for full-size / full color fashion magazine covers? Add in the low-light cameras that will happily shoot at dusk or night with professional grade output, and we are truly living in the future.

Not looking to make a movie, I'm looking for a consumer quality camera I can hold steady without a tripod. You used to be able to buy those in the $500 range. Now everything in the consumer range is "Hey, look at how small this is now! Isn't that great?!?!"

Apple's batteries are among the longest-lasting on the market. 10 hour iPad, 7 hour laptops. Even their smallest, thinest laptop gets 5 hours. Apple's battery numbers are also far more accurate than those listed by other manufacturers.

That's a lot less of a dig than it probably appears. Apple does what it does very well.

Sure, you just called Apple users locked-in, superficial cultists. Not a dig at all...

If you need a device to do those 99% of things, then buy an iPad. If you want a dedicated reader, you're much better off with a reader. Battery life measured in weeks instead of hours and eInk versus an LCD screen makes one worth having. I have a netbook and a Kindle, and both are essential to me when I travel.

I'm not entirely convinced this is aimed at upgraders, apart from bleeding edge users but seems to be more for drawing in the second round of buyers. Those that wanted the camera feature, those that have seen what competitors have produced and are now making their purchase decision. There seems to be a minor price reduction on the existing IP1 too, £329 for the 16Gig is showing at time of writing on the UK store, though the IP2 is not listed there yet. No doubt there's so much stock of the IP1 that a price drop will cause more fence sitters to buy in at the older model if they decide they don't want the newest.

It's a nice tactic and these guys really are the pro marketeers. They could sell water to fish.

This follows (loosely) Intel's tick - tock model and doesn't overwhelm the consumer too much allowing production methods to be refined to lower cost for the next tick product whilst still staying in a good market position with the tock item.

The XOOM is thicker, heavier, larger in all dimensions, and has a slightly better resolution and has the same processor (roughly).

But the real thing that kills the XOOM is the base cost. It's rumored to be $800 (or higher), far more than the $499 base iPad which is very practical. Lots of people do not need a huge amount of storage or 3G support.

I agree the XOOM looks like a good tablet, but it really shows that Apple is competing quite well on price in the tablet space.

It's rumored to be $800 (or higher), far more than the $499 base iPad which is very practical. Lots of people do not need a huge amount of storage or 3G support.

I remember back when those nasty PC guys used to compare Mac and PC prices. They'd point out the you could get a Dell for $249 and the cheapest Mac was $599. Of course, they'd leave out the fact that the Mac in question had much better specs than $249 Dell.So, are you really comparing a $499 iPad with 8GB of storage, 1024x768 screen, and no 3G, with a Xoom that has 32GB of storage, 1280x800 screen, and 3G support?Comparing the more closely equipped iPad with 32GB of storage and 3G comes to $729--$70 lower

In all seriousness, why was that a "normal" request? I understand (and use it) in cellphones, since they are commonly used as a mini-cam or a party self-cam. But why on a tablet? It feels more like ticking a feature box than anything anyone has seriously been clamouring for. A user-facing webcam for video-chat, okay, but what's the other for?

I had a 3G with the same performance issues when I upgraded the OS. I looked online for solutions and they suggested turning off the phone search feature. After doing that it was as fast as it had been before the upgrade.

The original iPhone is limited to iOS 3.1.3. iPhone 3G goes to 4.2 (and definitely suffers for it). Oddly enough, the two systems have identical processors, space, and mostly identical internal chipsets (with the exception of the 3G communications chipset, a GPS chipset, and one of the random controllers), and generally behave the same under load. Cutting off original iPhones from the 4 line was really just a marketing decision to push new phones. Similarly, the iPhone 3G being EOL'ed at 4.2 doesn't see

Cutting off original iPhones from the 4 line was really just a marketing decision to push new phones.

The original iPhone used considerably more battery power during normal use than the 3g. 4.0 could have easily overwhelmed it and made it essentially unusable unless you could charge multiple times a day.

They should've released the original iPad with a processor stolen from 15 years in the future, and just massively underclocked it. Then each software upgrade could underclock it a little bit less, and that way it could always match the speed of the current devices.

As a person casually interested in tablet computers, I never looked with too much interest at CPU speed. Screen size, application availability, OS and user interface usability and connection ports (USB is a must) are my most relevant factors in the choice. And price. I imagine, however, that even if I were an Apple enthusiast, CPU speed for a tablet would be less important than screen size and user interface. The iPad 2 is definitely an improved model, but no Apple enthusiast will be swept off his/her feet, though some will feel the urge to upgrade, no doubt. The rest of us won't really care about the iPad 2. In fact, at this point a much cheaper Android-based tablet computer may start to look more interesting than before ("Hey, even Apple didn't add much to their own iPad, why not get this $SEMI_ANONYMOUS_BRAND tablet instead?").

Unless I missed something, it still only comes with an embedded hard drive, forcing you to shell out $$ for a larger hard drive. Even my NookColor has an SD slot (and is also rootable on Android [dkszone.net]). I feel pretty much about this as I did the first one--looks cool, but considering it costs approx. the same as a laptop (except without Flash), it's an expensive toy.

The new audio output which supports 5.1 dolby and 1080p is huge. The HD output is especially nice for teachers since it supports any app, not just specific Apple sanctioned ones like the first iPad (at 480p).

Love the Slashdot reaction, especially the comments about what 'normal people' think. The iPad has a fucking awesome, objectively great battery life. How does Slashdot react? "It's not user replaceable!". Whatever. I've had mine for nearly a year now and it still gets over 10 hours. Maybe in another 2-3 years it'll degrade but, honestly, like I give a care.

The iPad is incredibly cheap. This thing was widely expected to start at $1000+ last year and it started at half that. The iPad 2 is coming in at the same price points and is way cheaper than the competition. The Xoom 32GB goes for £499 in the UK. The iPad 2 32GB? £399. A fucking c-note of difference, and a sterling c-note at that. So what's the Slashdot reaction? "Too expensive!" and "lower the price!".

iOS devices have a track record of holding up well against new cycles of iOS for at least a couple of years. As someone said above, the original 2007 iPhone 4 held up well until iOS 4 in 2010, and is still faster on its pared-back iOS 4 than some other non-Apple smartphones I've seen. Compare that with Android phones released months ago that already have no prospect of ever even seeing any OS updates, let alone being able to handle them with grace. What's the Slashdot reaction, though? "So I suppose they're going to brick my iPad now to force me to upgrade!". Bull. Shit. It's amazing how, on Slashdot, completely make-believe, possibly-maybe-in-the-future downsides for iOS seem to outrank actual, major-fuck-up downsides happening right now for Android.

The iPad has a solid, very nice capacitive resistant IPS display. Let's not forget that some tablets are still coming out with horrible, piece-of-shit resistive screens that can only actually be viewed from one angle beneath a layer of plastic. No, the iPad 2 does not have a retina display (whatever that would mean in the iPad world), but then again the only people who ever speculated that it would have absolutely no fucking clue what is going on inside Apple, just like the rest of us. So, what's the Slashdot reaction? Do they satisfy themselves with what is already a display that is better than most and as good as any out there, but which fails to live up to a standard that only existed in the realm of fantasy? Fuck no they don't! "No retina display! Rip-off!"

"No 4G!". Okay, seriously, get out more. Yes, in a few years, greater cellular data speeds will obviously be needed for services we can't even fully imagine right now. But right now, 6-7mpbs on an iPad 3G should be enough for everyone (ho ho). What is anyone doing today on their iPad in mobile situations anyway? Browsing Flickr? Streaming Netflix? Can't these things be done perfectly well at 3.5G speeds? What about data caps? Besides, are there tablets out there that actually have 4G? Whatever '4G' even means. Do you mean LTE or WiMax? American LTE or Chinese LTE? The one available in some places in the US or in some places in Europe, and none of which is available in any true scale? Man, I can't imagine why Apple hasn't leaped head-first into this technology, which is so obviously ready for primetime!

"No 7-inch screen!". Fuck off. This from the same crowd that roared that the iPad was just a big iPhone. 7-inch screens are a cop-out by bullshit manufacturers who cannot price-match the iPad at 10 inches.

"No Flash!". Yeah okay. You get that one. I'm really missing those wicked banner ads spamming my eyes from all corners. What about iAd, you might cleverly retort? I have 200 apps and maybe 15 that I use daily or very often, and I have never - as in not once, ever - seen an iAd. Anyway it's true that, once in a blue moon, I come across a video that isn't playable via HTML5 video. Somehow I get by. If you're genuinely bothered by the lack of Flash, then I respect that. IMO this is as close to a genuine trade-off as the iPad comes. I have a sneaky feeling, though, that a lot of the uproar surrounding Flash and iOS is actually coming from people who are scrambling for something (anything!) that they can fire at Apple

Spoken like a middle income spoiled brat. Your whole post boils down to "I'll by another when this one is obsolete"iPad is not Cheap. Just because something could have been more expensive doesn't mean 'cheap'.

And stop referring to/. as if it's some kind of group think, it's not. Different fanbois and hater comes out for different things. Trolls always just come out.

"LTE or WiMax?"Neither are 4G.Don't get pissey at people because you have no clue about 4g.

"On the other hand, when it comes to poxy Motorola or Samsung shitboxes that actually ARE left out of OS upgrades and ARE more expensive and DO have crappy battery life... well, we seem to have endless patience for those."No, completely different haters come out for those.

And to be fair, the iPAd was compared to the Touch; which it is. A big touch. Which is neither good nor bad.

Me? I would gt an iPAd 2, it has what I wanted in the iPAd 1, Camera for video calls. Unfortunately the times in bad right now, financially.

The iPad 2 is coming in at the same price points and is way cheaper than the competition. The Xoom 32GB goes for £499 in the UK.

I dunno how it is in UK, but in US, no-contract Xoom is $799, while iPad with comparable specs (3G 32Gb) is $729. So the actual difference is $70, and Xoom is exactly 10% more expensive than iPad. "Way cheaper"? Not really.

But Xoom has a slightly larger screen (10.1" vs 9.7") and higher resolution (1280x800 160ppi vs 1024x768 130ppi), and smaller physical dimensions. Then there's the SD slot. Compared to iPad 2 specifically, a much better camera. For geeks, there's also openness, even if you don't unlock/root - you have proper filesystem shared between apps, full support for background processes (I run an FTP server on mine so that I don't have to muck around with cables to sync it with PC), and much more. Is that all worth the extra $70? It certainly did for me, but it is, of course, subjective.

Er, a Xoom is actually quite a bit bigger than an iPad:)That's kind of what 'larger screen' means.

Thing is, the bezel around the screen in iPad is very large, and it's much smaller on Xoom. The guy in another reply have posted the precise numbers. I was still somewhat wrong - it's smaller on one dimension but bigger on another. Here it is:

And IIRC, Android tablets like the Xoom reportedly even have higher end components than the ipad. The simple fact is, Android in placing tremendous pressure on Apple to compete. To date, there isn't a satisfied Apple iphone 3gs and later, or ipad user, who doesn't owe a great big thank you to Google too.

This is the way the market is supposed to work. Multiple companies all competing to grab customers with the best widget. Therefore, forcing all competing in that widget space to compete based on the goodness

PC manufacturers really lost consumer confidence by putting "high end" components in a machine that real was not designed to take full advantage of them. Anyone can put a arbitrarily high speed processor, for which the marginal cost will be small, or a huge number of USB ports, again with small additional marginal costs. The problem is that if one does not put a high speed FSB, what have you done?

For android the question is can it run Flash. Do the batteries last a long time. These is where iOS is ve

Same here. Funny how they say they got 9x faster graphics and 2x faster CPU, but didn't bother implementing retina display, which, at it's worst-case point, would take a 4x higher toll on the device (assuming quadrupling total pixel count).

I think the manufacturing of the higher-res displays was the problem. Either they ended up being too expensive or there were too many defects.

I need a tablet to read stuff. I want to do it in a way that would match the visual experience of reading a book.

I work in the art departments of various movies. Lots of reference images and paintings floating around. I would reaaaaally like to go paperless. I'm not the only one, the iPad is popping up all over Hollywood. It may even finally convince the big-wigs that wireless internet should be part of every facility. I also know a couple of photographers that would love to have a high-res iPad for reviewing photos.

In addition to the lack of retina display, there are some underlying technical issues which prevent professional photographers from using the iPad. Many photographers would like to use an app related to Adobe's Lightroom for immediate importing, tagging, and initial review and screening of photos from a photoshoot. But because of Apple's restrictions on direct writing of files and a few other technical issues, this is not apparently possible at this time, according to Adobe. If Apple and Adobe were to find

Many photographers would like to use an app related to Adobe's Lightroom for immediate importing, tagging, and initial review and screening of photos from a photoshoot. But because of Apple's restrictions on direct writing of files and a few other technical issues, this is not apparently possible at this time, according to Adobe.

Do you have a link for that? Because all of that is possible currently. There is no restriction on "direct writing of files".

You seriously think they can ship a 2048x1536 tablet with 10 hours of battery life?

I'd be perfectly happy with a 2048x1536 iPad with a 2 and a half hour battery life, frankly, but I don't think you really understand how these things work.

Most of the energy for this is spent literally in the backlight. Given that the display size doesn't change (resolution doubles, pixel count quadruples, yet display size stays the same), then neither does the backlight. Energy driving the electronics isn't all that much of

My iphone 3G is 2.5 years old. HTC, samsung and motorola so far aren't supporting hardware older than 18 months and then only if it was really popular in the beginning. The very fact that there are Android phones selling right now with 2.1 on them is ludicrous. the fact those phone will never get a software update is just scary.

When apple ships 4.3 all devices that they are currently selling will ship with it standard. Minus the ones currently in the supply chain. In 6-8 weeks you will have a hard tim

HTC may not support old phones but that doesn't mean you can't update the phone (unlike iOS based handsets). I have a 2-3 old HTC G1 that I use as a hacking phone and I recently updated it to Android 2.3 thanks to XDA developers. If you have an old Android handset and want the latest firmware just search the XDA developers forums.

And it looks like Apples own playground is starting to build up. Like FaceTime works only between iDevices and macs.

I haven't owned an Apple product before, but after following Engadget's live food I have to say iPad 2 looks fantastic. Really, the Android tablets are so far from it that it would be almost stupid to choose something else. I guess I'm losing it against Apple, but I think I'm going to buy it as soon as it comes out in Europe.

You mean anyone who runs the skype client...Skype is not an open spec, so you are at their mercy to provide a client for your platform of choice, and for skype to provide you with service. I prefer Apple's facetime, and i doubt it will be too long before there are third party implementations.

Actually Facetime is an open spec, anyone can implement a device that supports it...

Now how you find them from an iOS to non-IOS device, that part I'm not sure how easy it is to implement.

Care to give me a link to the spec? I know it uses industry standard protocols, but the spec?

I like FaceTime for being the first simple, grandma' proof, button free SIP client, but it's not available on other platforms that Apple's own. An open spec SIP based platform would be usable with other video enabled SIP clients. Facetime AFAIK is not.

Although Apple has not published the spec exactly, they have said they will (hence that's why it is open) but it's all built atop existing standards glued together [stackoverflow.com], there's plenty enough material there to build an initial implementation atop of.

Honest question, I'm wondering what you feel the upcoming gingerbread tablets are lacking that makes the iPad that much better? I'm still not convinced i need.. or even want.. either, but right now if i did it would be android simply so i'm not locked into iTunes again. Hated that with my iPhone, don't want to go back.

Honest question, I'm wondering what you feel the upcoming gingerbread tablets are lacking that makes the iPad that much better? I'm still not convinced i need.. or even want.. either, but right now if i did it would be android simply so i'm not locked into iTunes again. Hated that with my iPhone, don't want to go back.

The android market has a very small fraction of the high end apps and games that the itunes store offers. I believe this will change in the future, but as of today its not even close.
Honestly, it wouldnt matter if not for the fact that almost all of the most popular applications are ios only.

I'm wondering what you feel the upcoming gingerbread tablets are lacking that makes the iPad that much better?

What they're lacking is the $500 "sweet" price point that the iPad is repeatedly able to hit. Would I pay more for a more feature-rich tablet? Maybe. Would Joe Sixpack? Probably not - The current iPad price is in his sweet spot.

This is harder than it sounds - Because Apple is so vertically integrated, from processor to other hardware to software they're able to build at a cost that others find hard to match. Additionally, the App Store exclusivity means the device can be sold at a low margin and they can make it up on apps. A low-end Xoom would probably still cost the same as an iPad with fewer features.

The iPad is still assembled by cheap Chinese labor who sometimes get suicidal and jump off the Foxconn factory roof so they installed nets.

Well if that bothers you I imagine you aren't buying electronics from any other hardware maker that hides the numbers Apple publishes and produces gear at factories that treat the workers even worse. How do you think a $300 Android tablet gets to be that cheap anyway...

Forever. It is a strategy tax. Adding SDHC would make the lower end models compete with high-end models, and Apple prices the low-end models competively, but they make the profit on the high-end models that are much more expensive than expanding the low-end models would cost. 32Gbyte SDHC($50) plus a 3G modem($20) cost a lot less than the $330 price difference.

If they added SDHC-readers they would either have to raise prices on the low-end, or reduce the profit margins on the high-end.

Not that that makes it okay, I still resent them for it, but it makes perfect business sense, and this is no point in dreaming unless they are put under more customer pressure.

No, I think you misunderstood the term "Strategy Tax", it is not a tax on the user, it is a tax on the company. Through business decisions they are preventing themselves from producing the best possible product. As long as their product is attractive enough, that is not an actual problem, but it does leave room for competitors to provide something they don't. Apple hasn't taken a hit from strategy tax yet, but strategy tax has come back to bite microsoft several times, and it is mainly a term used internall

They both get from point A to point B. You can go the same places with either of them. The key difference is they have distinct advantages in different contexts. The same is true when comparing the iPad to the iPhone.

When people call these the iPad XL, it is very close to the truth since they both run the iOS and have close to the same functionality...

0%, because all programs still have to run on the original iPad.
You can have a "fragmentation free ecosystem" or you can have real advancement each generation It's kind of hard to have both. This is why PC games and some Android games have adjustable graphics settings for different hardware, but Apple deems that to be "fragmentation."

I would disagree. The iOS APIs specifically allow for graceful degradation of framerate in 3d rendering. To give a concrete example, when I switched from the iPhone 3GS to the 4, framerates for 3d games and augmented reality apps shot through the roof.

As far as adding adjustable graphics settings, it's completely unnecessary. With only a handful of devices to support, standard practice to to pre-select optimized settings for each device, which are transparently loaded without user involvement. Very elegant and very very easy for developers to implement.

Most games for iOS include high-resolution textures which are loaded when you run it on an iPhone4 or an iPad and lower-resolution textures when the game runs on an iPhone 3G(S) or iPod Touch. New games will surely make use of the power of the new iPad2 and will simply scale down to run on the iPad1 or any other iOS device.

On a desktop, adding more resolution to your monitor allows you to fit more stuff on the screen. On iOS devices, where each app takes over the entire screen when it's running, the only way to scale up the resolution without making everything look like crap (anti-aliasing, anyone) would be to *double* the resolution in each direction. That's what the upgrade to the iPhone 4 Retina Display did. Is that even technically feasible for something the size of an iPad at the current price point?
Thousands of app developers are thrilled that they don't have to redesign their applications for a new resolution.

Have you read the reviews of Flash on Android?... every review points out how it turns the entire experience to shit.

Speaking of that, installing flash is kind of like turning my basement into a septic tank for the entire municipal sewage system. Nobody really wants that, but we all have to listen to "that guy" going on and on about how real end users like my mom love the experience of finding diamond rings that accidentally get flushed, and the smell isn't really so bad once you get used to it, and its the most modern way of civil engineering so it must be the best way to do it.

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you iPad fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of an iPad (a 1GHz A4 w/32 Gigs of flash) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on.Mac to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Motorola Xoom running Android, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this iPad, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

Why would you want to stream MKVs? Why not just rip your BR discs to MP4 containers with x264? Or are you not getting those MKVs from your own masters, and you're too fucking lazy to put them in a different container?

Emulator? Flash Browsing (by choice? are you a masochist?)? SD? Okay, I guess I can give you that last one...I suppose...though with 64GB SD cards hitting the $150-200 mark, I don't think I'll be carrying many of them around with me to use in a $500 device. Might as well drop the extra $330